By FRANK KEEGAN – Think of this as a football game except the fans must pay twice for tickets — win or lose — and the franchise can impose fines, confiscate their property and put them in prison if they don’t pay.
Another difference is that the team, which promised to gain eight yards every play, got sacked for a 19-yard loss and had to gain more than 44 yards on the next play just to get back to the line of scrimmage. So far they gained only five.
Under immutable rules of the defined benefit pension game, the team now must gain 48 yards to get back to the line of scrimmage. If they gain anything less than 48, the next play requires even longer yardage, on and on forever falling behind.
Forget any first downs or touchdowns. This is a catastrophe.
What team pension should do is go long, but they can’t because of another natural, immutable pension game rule: Liquidity.
Liquidity decrees you can’t go long for the big gains because you have to keep the ball on the ground now to pay for the promised gains you failed to make.
This losing franchise’s leaders are trying to lengthen the field and stretch the clock to smooth out lost yardage long enough for them to get richer and skip town, but reality just whistled the two-minute warning.
Fans, who already got mugged in the parking lot on their way to the game, are starting to wake up and ask ugly questions.
Investors in the franchise are asking even uglier questions as debt and operating deficits mount.
Even the bloody and bruised players down on the field who thought they had been promised an easy endgame are starting to ask questions.
The fact is, according to U.S. Census data released this week for fiscal year 2009, state leaders paid themselves handsomely to lose $394 billion in “insurance trust revenue” after earning $83 billion in 2008.
“Cash and security holdings” dropped from $3.8 trillion to $3.1 trillion, a 19.3 percent loss on funds that must, in aggregate, earn about 8 percent and grow every year forever to pay promised benefits.
Latest census data for 2010 show that while the rout might have slowed a bit, the team is losing ground faster than it can ever make up.
Meanwhile the stadium is collapsing, and money to fix it is gone. Secret bets leaders made are going bad. The first aid station has no splints or bandages. Insurance premiums are unpaid. The front office is running out of cash and has trouble borrowing as debt mounts. And the big fat subsidy from the central league is running out.
Every time fans think they’ve figured out how bad things are things get worse.
For franchise leaders the answer is simple: Just charge the fans more for a game already lost.
But what they forget is this is an American game. The fans own it.
We get to fire everybody, change the rules, tear the whole thing down and start from scratch if necessary.
Frank Keegan is a national editor for The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, watchdog.org and statehousenewsonline.com . Any disgusted public employee, journalist, activist organization or citizen watchdog who wants help exposing government waste, fraud and abuse may contact him at: frank.keegan@franklincenterhq.org
Tags: catastrophe, Census, debt, deficits, game, liquidity, pensions, State
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